TrendWatcher

In case you don’t follow baseball, Major League Baseball made a deal with Columbia Pictures to put the logo for Spiderman 2 on the bases for a number of games this season. This made some baseball fans mad, and yesterday, MLB and Columbia scaled the promotion back.

There have been a number of instances lately where a public outcry affected corporate America. It’s clear that consumers have a strong voice, but unfortunately the voice isn’t unified. People tend to look at these things like elections. You cast your vote and then don’t worry about it. The constitution and our laws take over after the election and keep those in charge from going against the will of the people. Unfortunately there isn’t a constitution to keep corporations true to their word.

I don’t remember the date, but earlier this year/late last year, Walmart was about to roll out RFID tags in some of its stores. There was huge public outcry from the privacy people and they got a lot of consumers on board. As a result, Walmart delayed the roll out. Well, now nobody is paying attention and Walmart is rolling them out.

Political parties do a great job of keeping people organized. Sure they have there problems. It’s hard to find a place to hang your hat if you are pro-life and economically liberal or pro-choice and economically conservative, but for the most part a two party system at least keeps people interested.

If someone can figure out a way to keep consumers organized, we can wield a whole lot more power. Corporate America isn’t going to be too happy about it, but they will deal with it. I see a couple of hurdles:

1. People don’t have the time to stay involved.
2. There are too many issues to be dealt with.

Reducing the time it takes to be active in the consumer discussion and focusing the issues could go along way in giving Americans some of their voice back. Any bright ideas? Post them in the comments.